Famous "Home of the Bangalore Torpedo"!

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

For me, it's in New York, which is

1. The center of the universe
and

2. Where I work. Anything else is too far away, even if I telecommute, the electrons would get tired if they had to go much past Boston

My philosophy isn't that they pay me to code; they pay me to endure management and coworkers.

--
tbone1, YAPS (Yet Another Perl Schlub)
And remember, if he succeeds, so what.
- Chick McGee

RIGHT! tbone1; being allowed to code is the fringe benefit that keeps us!

  samCG hit it on the head, above.

    ... and btw: "...find work?" Why would I try to find work? Work is waaaaaay too good at finding /me."

My previous employer spent well over a year searching for a decent Perl coder in KL, and came up blank. I left about 3 months ago, and as far as I'm aware they are still looking.

But do you think they will keep them? ;-)

Regards,
Edward

Now that is the problem with Perl (A real Non-technical problem although). Companies don't get Perl programmers like Java guys.
Can anybody tell us Why so..????

Now that is the problem with Perl (A real Non-technical problem although). Companies don't get Perl programmers like Java guys. Can anybody tell us Why so..????

I'd put it down to two reasons.

Because Perl has proved so accessible (well done Larry :-) you get more people applying to Perl jobs with low general programming skills. This makes it harder to separate the wheat from the chaff.

New developers aren't seeing a long term career in Perl 5 so are concentrating on other languages.

Therefore none of us are qualified to make an informed choice.

True. When has lack of qualification ever interfered with having an opinion? ;-)

Therefore none of us are qualified to make an informed choice.

So, does that mean we have to go into journalism or politics? Or perhaps project management ...

--
tbone1, YAPS (Yet Another Perl Schlub)
And remember, if he succeeds, so what.
- Chick McGee

Heh, I have to entirely agree. My first reaction when I saw the poll was that the only way I could hope to answer it was to use job search engines and search for perl in all those cities.

Lacking the incentive to do that, I simply chose where I have a perl job figuring that I've had a somewhat easy time finding work here so that was the best I could possibly answer.

Fundamentally though all I really did was contribute to an aggregate of nonsense. This overly described synopsis of that is my atonement.

Sounds like something you should post as a Poll idea... :-)

This reminds me very much of the recent dust up in France... rather than encouraging entrepreneurship to create jobs, the passive and, oddly, accepted answer is to legislate hours.

I've done some pretty decent Perl hacking in some very remote locales, with nothing but a Jeep battery to recharge the laptop. Some of my best design/development has occured with a tall Whibdey's Port and tasty cigar at my elbow, lit only by sunshine or campfire.

If your purpose is to locate yourself to find work, you'll always be a nomad.

If your purpose is to locate the work that finds you, you'll always be employed.

Hear, hear!

Not to mention the possibility of creating a project and hiring telecommuters from wherever they are... no taxes, no staff coffeemaker, no watercooler politics discussions on your dime...

It's not just France... we've had a few "dust ups" (love that phrase) here in the US about all these "furriners" who are showing up our homegrown programmers, or, at least, underbidding them. Tempest in a teapot, of course; Ukrainian and Russian programmer paychecks are now rising rapidly, and people here have rediscovered the benefits of live team brainstorming sessions.

As we have. We started our business with two Ukrainian brothers and a few others, built our systems over the course of several years, and have now imported them (the brothers) into the US, paying them US-sized paychecks. It allowed us to survive our own fumbling attempts to define our product and our market, and keep the business going until it was profitable. Now that it is, we're reaching for the next level, with our two very good programmer friends having earned a piece of the company. I don't know that we could have done so had we tried to depend on only my programming skills or hiring American talent. And yes, we got lucky, hiring two of the most talented and loyal guys over there.

Don Wilde
"There's more than one level to any answer."

Ah well. It seems that nobody outside of California knows that San Jose is actually bigger than San Francisco. You probably got lumped in with San Francisco, along with Sebastopol, which is even further away on the other side. People outside of California also assume that Silicon Valley would naturally want to be associated with San Francisco. I haven't found that to be the case anywhere south of, say, Palo Alto, which seems to be the city that most wants to think of itself as in the middle, independent from both the San Jose and San Francisco spheres of influence.

Why wouldn't somebody believe it? Dayton, Cincinnati, and Cleveland are still important business centers.

emc

"Being forced to write comments actually improves code, because it is easier to fix a crock than to explain it. "
—G. Steele

Hey! I thought tellecommuting jobs were scarce!

I'd like to tellecommute...

Since tellecommuting got almost half of votes, I gotta know what's the secret?

If you meet someone in a bar and they say that they are a software developer and that they "telecommute" it's like a code to say that they don't have a real job and will take whatever web scripting contracts they can get ;)

Thinks: Did I say that out loud? I hope I remembered to post as anonymonk...

Actually I see a lot of useless criticism in the Monastery about Perl web programming and this is really bad.

OK, we all know that being seen as a "web programming language" has done a lot of harm to Perl, but ruling out web programming is, IMHO, a very dumb thing.


---
Er Galvão Abbott
www.galvao.eti.br
Porto Alegre Perl Mongers

I'd like to tellecommute...

What I'd like to do, would be to get a telecommute job.

Then I'd move someplace with low taxes, a bit of sun in the winter and warmer temperatures.

I could find a nice place, live well -- and charge India prices. (Hmm, Indian food is good!)

If you steal this idea, please hire me. :-)

To say nothing of Ogdenville, North Haverbrook, and Brockway; by gum Perl put them on the map. (Or maybe it was the monorail . . . maybe a monorail controlled by Perl)

Seriously though I'm more surprised that ATL wasn't an option.

I'm glad to see that Canberra didn't make the list as there are very few Perl jobs here.

That seems to be true. I was looking at government contracters as a potential source of employment a while back and was very disheartened with what I saw.

Government leading the way in OpenSource? I only see Microsoft technology jobs and some Java. At least the US military likes their suppliers to use ada (is that still true?).

I voted for Sydney because it is at least in the same country as me but I've never looked for Perl work so I wouldn't really know :)

No experience + no CS BS = no perl jobs, anywhere :-(

This is true, but unlike a lot of things, you can bootstrap perl experience. Write up some semi-useful program, put it on the web, and it's resume fodder. I'd certainly consider that a plus in a potential junior hire.

The degree thing helps to get you into interviews, but the amount it is valued varies greatly from company to company. Our lead architect doesn't have a college degree at all, and a fairly small percentage of our development team (less than a third) has a CS or similar degree. Some companies really are fond of them, though.

-- Kirby, WhitePages.com

Not only is my city not listed; not one city in my country was listed. :-(

EDIT: Okay, okay - stupid post. I would still debate that there are very few jobs specifically for Perl that don't require years of experience, but perhaps the pool of Perl programmers is also small enough so this doesn't matter. And you're right that Perl can be used for many other things, especially if you code first in Perl and then optimize specific portions in a lower-level language..

What are you saying? That there are no full-time on-site Perl jobs? I beg to differ, and so does jobs.perl.org.

I'm not sure what your definition of 'very few' is, and I'll admit I haven't done a statistically valid survey of the data, but I can tell you that there are perl jobs that are exactly what you describe. In fact, the one I'm in now was specifically looking for a person with 1-2 years of Perl experience for the primary task, although the person would also be a backup sysadmin for the department (only 3 IT folks in the department)

Here's the exact text (bad capitalization included), except for company info removed:

Read more... (859 Bytes)

(um ... I had ~8 years of Perl experience at that point ... I'm still not sure why I applied for the job, other than boredom from having been unemployed for a few months ... and I had heard good things about the location)

Now, from a project development standpoint -- keeping people on site makes sense -- when you need something, you can talk in person, not through e-mail, or have to fly someone in. It might not make sense for all companies, but for some, it does. (especially when you require security clearances, which results in multiple months before you can get full access)

Oh -- and I'm in the Washington, DC, area ... and the dc.pm mailing list normally has a posting or two per week for people who are primarily Perl programmers.

If you need something you can send the person an IM message or exchange a few emails and get more details, better laid and have someplace to look for details later. Shoot me a message and you'll have the solution in half an hour, call me and we'll still be talking in half an hour.

Jenda


Support Denmark! Defend the free world!

the vast majority of hosting is done on remote servers

And as we all know, Perl is really only used for web server scripting.

We're building the house of the future together.

Since the vast majority of hosting is done on remote servers at some third party hoster, rather than in-house, there's no reason why most people should have to live on site.

Apart from that whole communicating with the rest of the development team / company / customer / user thang.

JavaScript isn't precisely a programming language? Why not? It is Turing Complete.

<script language="PerlScript">
 $window->document->write('Hello world!');
</script>